New York Times editorial board: Rolling Stone outrage 'over the top'

7/19/13 11:00 AM EDT

The New York Times editorial board responds to the torrent of outrage over Rolling Stone's Dzhokhar Tsarnaev much the same way I did earlier this week:

[S]ingling out one magazine issue for shunning is over the top, especially since the photo has already appeared in a lot of prominent places, including the front page of this newspaper, without an outcry. As any seasoned reader should know, magazine covers are not endorsements.

Time magazine, for example, had quite a few covers featuring Adolf Hitler during the war years. Less than a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Time featured a less-than-demonic photo of Osama bin Laden. Charles Manson appeared on Rolling Stone’s cover 40-some years ago for a jailhouse interview that was as chilling as it was revealing. We could go on.

Even by the standards of phony post-9/11 outrages, this one is idiotic. ... What are these idiots thinking? That because Tsarnaev looked like a cute dude and “a celebrity” (which he is, by the way, as is George Zimmerman), impressionable American kids will enlist with Al Qaeda? That publishing an article about the psyche of a mass murderer somehow dishonors those he murdered? The whole point of the piece is that Tsarnaev didn’t look or act like a terrorist in an FBI mug shot but was a “golden person” to those who knew him — “seamless, like a billiard ball,” in the words of his high-school wrestling coach in Cambridge. That’s how he got away with it even in our overweening surveillance state. ... No piece of journalism has shed more light on that question to date than this article by Janet Reitman ... The more readers who are tempted to dig into this exemplary exercise in long-form journalism (11,000 words) by the Rolling Stone cover, the better. Those pandering politicians and merchants who are encouraging readers to shun the magazine or barring it altogether — Boston mayor Thomas Menino, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, the pharmacy chain CVS — are, as they used to say in the Bush era, on the side of the terrorists.